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Gabelvampir: The Manhole Masterpiece Edition (That's the weird one as it is still a v1 installer)

Redownloaded this one and it was identical to the one I had in backup, downloaded August 2011.

korell: Okay, so I've had a look inside the new Jagged Alliance 2 installer.

The old JA2 2.0.0.5 installer was 476MB. The new JA2 2.0.0.5 installer is 388MB.

Extracting them, they both decompress to about 652MB. The actual game files appear to be identical. The only differences I've found are:

The new installer has a non-expired digital signature. The new installer does not contain signtool.exe (a Microsoft digital signing tool). The new installer contains a picture of a rabbit (see the attachment).

None of these changes make any difference to the game itself, so I can only assume that other changes are install script code changes. As for the 88MB difference, I can only guess at better compression rate as the game's installed files seem to be the same.

As for the rabbit, I guess it is just a hidden "Easter Egg" for those who go extracting GOG's installers.

Gabelvampir: The Manhole Masterpiece Edition (That's the weird one as it is still a v1 installer)

mrkgnao: Redownloaded this one and it was identical to the one I had in backup, downloaded August 2011.

korell: Okay, so I've had a look inside the new Jagged Alliance 2 installer.

The old JA2 2.0.0.5 installer was 476MB. The new JA2 2.0.0.5 installer is 388MB.

Extracting them, they both decompress to about 652MB. The actual game files appear to be identical. The only differences I've found are:

The new installer has a non-expired digital signature. The new installer does not contain signtool.exe (a Microsoft digital signing tool). The new installer contains a picture of a rabbit (see the attachment).

None of these changes make any difference to the game itself, so I can only assume that other changes are install script code changes. As for the 88MB difference, I can only guess at better compression rate as the game's installed files seem to be the same.

As for the rabbit, I guess it is just a hidden "Easter Egg" for those who go extracting GOG's installers.

Getting a GOG notification when this bug is fixed seems like a very good thing. (And re-using version numbers is a very bad thing.)

My list is of course not complete as I do not have all GOG games, although I have far to many (if you judge by games I have but did not play yet).

I really wish the GOG would be more transparent about their updates, reusing version numbers with (at least in the case of BasS) big changes is not a move that inspires much confidence, especially when done silently. If GOG had a changelog and Linux support (especially for Indie games) it would be the best online game store existing in my oppinion. As it is now it is a tie for me between GOG and Steam.

As for the bug mentioned, I was referring to the bug that the uninstaller in early v2 GOG packages did purge all compatibilty settings for all executables from the Windows registry. If I remember correctly. I don't if there is a list of games that have that problem the one that don't, but at least all games with version 2.0.1.X should be fixed.

Edit: Oh and because someone asked, the installers must have been updated later this week, probably Thursday or Friday.

Gabelvampir: I really wish the GOG would be more transparent about their updates, reusing version numbers with (at least in the case of BasS) big changes is not a move that inspires much confidence, especially when done silently. If GOG had a changelog and Linux support (especially for Indie games) it would be the best online game store existing in my oppinion. As it is now it is a tie for me between GOG and Steam.

Edit: Oh and because someone asked, the installers must have been updated later this week, probably Thursday or Friday.

Yes, me too. I mean, it isn't even as if it would be that hard to have MD5/SHA-1 hashes for the files. That way we could check our own installers to see if we need to redownload any. All that it would need from GOG is that whoever uploads the new installer onto the server makes a note of the new file hash and has it put on their database.

But seriously, EVERY SINGLE CHANGE should have a new version number so that it is clearly visible that something has changed. And the full four part version number should be shown on the download page, not just the first three numbers as is currently done for the v2 installers.

And yes, I asked about when they made these silent updates, so I'm gutted to find out that it appears to be only a few days ago at most, being as I downloaded a fair few last weekend when I had access to fast internet (a very rare occurrence). Now that I'm back on my normal slow ADSL I find I have a number to redownload. Not happy.

Fuzzyfireball: The fact GOG has been silent about the request for a changelog, me suspects an optional client might be in the works.

I wouldn't consider something optional if it contains major features that are missing from the website. If the client ends up handling changes automatically and because of that we are deprived of a changelog, I would hardly call it optional. I would call it a damn shame.

@korell I agree with everything you said about the current state of GOG.

And I can add that GOG should keep to provide clean installs of games without mods (at least as an option). But they seem to use mods if they help with Windows 8 compatibiliy (see the recent version of Fallout 2).

If you have slow Internet, I'd wait until that whole affair is sorted out before you download the installers. If they do not say what changed (in the subforums) and do not increase the version number then the changes should be not be all that essential and/or positive. They really should have announced something, as wild speculation by fans about a silent party normally gets quite out of hand, especially on the Internets.

Fuzzyfireball: The fact GOG has been silent about the request for a changelog, me suspects an optional client might be in the works.

mrkgnao: I wouldn't consider something optional if it contains major features that are missing from the website. If the client ends up handling changes automatically and because of that we are deprived of a changelog, I would hardly call it optional. I would call it a damn shame.

Even if they built an optional Steam-like client, I'd want to have a changelog. In fact I often wonder what Steam updates do, a changelog for every update should be mandatory for that too.

Fuzzyfireball: The fact GOG has been silent about the request for a changelog, me suspects an optional client might be in the works.

mrkgnao: I wouldn't consider something optional if it contains major features that are missing from the website. If the client ends up handling changes automatically and because of that we are deprived of a changelog, I would hardly call it optional. I would call it a damn shame.

mrkgnao: I wouldn't consider something optional if it contains major features that are missing from the website. If the client ends up handling changes automatically and because of that we are deprived of a changelog, I would hardly call it optional. I would call it a damn shame.

Fuzzyfireball: At this point I'd call it a godsend. Tired of manually checking.

I'd rather GOG get the current system working right before building a client to handle it. I mean, take a look at what we've found out this evening with Beneath a Steel Sky. If that were being handled by a client then it could quite feasibly have redownloaded the game for you, replacing your nice ScummVM CD version with the poorer quality DOSBox floppy disc version.

Fuzzyfireball: At this point I'd call it a godsend. Tired of manually checking.

korell: I'd rather GOG get the current system working right before building a client to handle it. I mean, take a look at what we've found out this evening with Beneath a Steel Sky. If that were being handled by a client then it could quite feasibly have redownloaded the game for you, replacing your nice ScummVM CD version with the poorer quality DOSBox floppy disc version.

Pretty sure there was a CD version for DOS? All they'd have to do is update it back.

Gabelvampir: So here is the hopefully complete list of everything that updated for me without changing version numbers. The whole thing was probably a fixing of the installers that still had that v2 uninstall bug and were not scheduled for some other update, but that is speculation on my part.

Hmm I should write something to the support regarding the broken Fallout Tactics installer, but I think I wait till Monday or so, they'll already have it fixed themselves then, problably.

So now they're being updated without changing version numbers? This is getting really stupid, how many damn times am I going to have to re-download these games?

korell: Beneath a Steel Sky has gone from being a 78.1MB installer to being just 21.3MB, and no version number change between these two, clearly different, versions. The download page still gives the 78.1MB download size, even though the download is now actually only 21.3MB. What's going on GOG?

EDIT: BIG WARNING FOLKS!!! I've extracted both the old 2.0.0.9 and the new 2.0.0.9 installers for Beneath a Steel Sky just to have a look around. The old one uses ScummVM, the new one uses DOSBox. That isn't the big bit though. The old one has a sky.dsk file of 69MB, whilst the new one has a sky.dsk file of only 8.41MB, highly suggesting that the old one was the CD version and the new one isn't, meaning we now have an inferior version of the game.

Well, at least I can get the correct aspect ratio with the DOSBox version as I couldn't figure out how force the correct ratio in ScummVM, but the downgrade from the CD version really sucks.

Oh, I did not know that that was a problem, I only tried the GOG Graphic Mode Setup once because I used DOSBox before I bought games on GOG, so I know how to configure it myself and prefer it that way. But I appreciate that GOG wrote something for that and that they fixed it.

1 - the games shelves is not very clear --> need to downlioad a file for knowing the version of a game (and worse now with the language tab ..... no comment).

A solution : a changelog in plain text + the version number written in plain sight .(not very hard to do)

2 - no notification for a game gaining a v2 installer

I have no hope for this being fixed in the future.

3 - for the 'old' bug with a v2 installer i though they said they were working on a solution which doesn't require to redownload the games files ..... i have some serious doubts now

4 - it's not very clever to reusing the same version number OR they have something to hide. (maybe the point 3)

i start to think the actual game update's system is a total disaster since the v2 installers and very shaddy. The games compatibility goes in the right direction , but the communication has many flaws.